“Western thinking has become conservative:
the world situation should stay as it is at any cost;
there should be no changes. ....
The communist regime in the East could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support
from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see
communism's crimes. And when they no longer could do so, they tried to justify them. In
our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero
and less than zero. But Western intellectuals still look at it with interest and with
empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to
withstand the East.”
[Dr. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn at the Commencement,
8 June 1978, Harvard University]